How a google bot sees your site
-
So I have stumbled across various websites like this:
http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/internet/google/googlebot-spoofer/
The concept here is to be able to view your site as a googlebot sees it. However, the results are a little puzzling. Google is reading the text on my page but not the title tags according to the results. Are websites like this accurate OR does Google not read title tags and H1 tags anymore?
Also on a slighly related note. I noticed the results show the navigation bar is being read first by google, is this bad and should the navigation bar be optimized for keywords as well? If it did, it would read a bit funny and the "humans" would be confused.
-
You need to pull this forum question. That link redirects to a spammy site about "Freeing Syria."
-
The instructions are near the bottom of the page:
In order to use Fetch as Googlebot, you'll need to have added and verified your site in Webmaster Tools. Then, follow these instructions:
- On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
- On the Dashboard, under Diagnostics, click Fetch as Googlebot.
- In the text box, type the path to the page you want to check.
- In the dropdown list, select the type of fetch you want. To see what our web crawler Googlebot sees, select Web. To see what our mobile crawler Googlebot-Mobile sees, select cHTML (this is used mainly for Japanese web sites) or Mobile XHTML/WML.
- Click Fetch.
Once googlebot has fetched your page you'll have a "success" link that you can click on to see what Googlebot saw.
This will be the header, including the server response code and then the html that googlebot received.
What this doesn't tell you is how this was interpreted by Google, of course this is where SEOMoz's on-page reports and crawl stats can help detect errors and way your can improve your on-page optimisation.
-
Thanks, but even under that Fetch as Googlebot link you posted, I don't see how to get an accurate tool of how Google views your site.
-
These sites are good for a quick scan of the contextual formatting of a website, but not for really telling how Google (or any specific search engine) sees your site. That specific one you linked to is horrible.
Google does see title, H1, other headers, meta description and most elements of your site. A more accurate way to see how google sees your site would be to:
- See how the page looks in the index. Type "site:myspecificurl.com" into google for the page you want to see and google will just return the results of what it has in its index. That is how google sees your site. If your site/pages are not in the index, get them in (#2 below).
- Verify through Google Webmaster Tools. In the webmaster tools you can see what pages of your site are being indexed/crawled through google, and you can also request specific pages to be crawled again if you need. This combined with an xml sitemap will usually get pages indexed pretty quick, and then you can verify with the same methodology as i mentioned above.
- Use the SEOmoz pro toolset here and set up a campaign and the tool will tell you if you are missing any title tags or other important on-page elements. the seomoz "bot" crawls similar to google, so that should give you a feel for how it works.
-
A lot of these sites are badly coded garbage. I would ignore these sites.
-
I don't know how far I'd trust such third party sites. Take a look at Google Webmaster Tools. There's a Fetch as Googlebot tool under diagnostics.
Here's the Google help about it::
Google certainly does read title and heading tags!
As far as the navigation bar goes - always think about humans first. Sometimes you can improve relevance by avoiding generic names. Avoid generic terms like "Articles" for instance and replace it with something that better describes the content behind the click "nutrition guide" or "food facts"...
The fact that your navigation is being read first isn't a problem - it's a convention that is hardly going to be penalised by a search engine.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google News problem
Hello to all. The latest Google algorithm changes have had a big impact on the way that Google news features stories, at least in my country. I've been featured heavily in Google News until about 6th of october, when the changes had the biggest impact, but since then, I haven't been featured at all. Prior to this, I would be featured for keywords on almost any article, not necessarily on the 1st position, but I was almost always there. Posts still show up in the dedicated News category, but not in the main search pages. I've seen a lot of websites being impacted, but some with lower ranks than mine still show up there. I haven't done any changes prior to the 6th of october, and I haven't done any link building campaings, just getting links from higher ranking news sites in my country, for articles I wrote. What I'd like to know is if there were any major changes for Google News and I'm not complying with any of them, or If i could check to see if there are any other problems. I don't have any penalties disclosed by Google, and no new errors in the Webmasters console, I'm just baffled by the fact that overnight the website was completely cut off from being featured in Google News. And one other strange thing, I'm now ranking better for searches that are kind of opposite to my website's main theme. Think about mainly writing about BMW, and less about AUDI, but ranking a lot better for the latter, and a lot less for the other. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | thefrost0 -
Do Com Junct links affect your site with Google and Penguin
We received the dreaded letter from google in reference to "unnatural or artificial links" Our site has affiliate programs through Commission Junction and Link Share and between the two programs we have over 8000 affiliates or advertisers. Our site has been very successful, but our organic search traffic is down as our rankings in the search engines have dropped. My question is do the affiliate links have an effect on our site with Panda or Penguin?
Technical SEO | | Statrak0 -
Not ranking on Google
Hi all, I am optimising a site which is a hotel directory for a small island in the Mediterranean - Malta. The site is www.maltahotelsonline.com. I did a keyword research and optimised the page. However I am now at link building stage. Since we do not have many links the site is still not ranking very well for the desired keywords (ranking fine on Bing and Yahoo yet not on Google). As a result there isn't much traffic on the site. 1. Is there any particular issue that you can spot on this site that is not allowing it to rank well on Google? 2. Any suggestions on link-building please?
Technical SEO | | ICON_Malta0 -
Site Purchase and 301
Hello, I just started working with a new client. Since then the client has purchased another company. We have re-branded the new companies home page and 301 redirected the rest of the site's links to the corresponding pages on the holding companies site. Since then the rankings have tanked. I looked at both companies back link profiles and realized that they are quite spammy from the last SEO contractor they hired. That said, the site was ranking fine until last Friday. I was wondering if anyone had seen temporary rankings decrease after 301ing a domain to a different site? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | TargetClick0 -
Do we need to manually submit a sitemap every time, or can we host it on our site as /sitemap and Google will see & crawl it?
I realized we don't have a sitemap in place, so we're going to get one built. Once we do, I'll submit it manually to Google via Webmaster tools. However, we have a very dynamic site with content constantly being added. Will I need to keep manually re-submitting the sitemap to Google? Or could we have the continually updating sitemap live on our site at /sitemap and the crawlers will just pick it up from there? I noticed this is what SEOmoz does at http://www.seomoz.org/sitemap.
Technical SEO | | askotzko0 -
Does google "see through" php/asp redirects?
A lot of the time I see companies employing a technique like this: <a target="_blank" href="/external/wcpages/referral.aspx?URL=http%253a%252f%252fwww.xxxx.ca&ReferralType=W&ProfileID=22&ListingID=96&CategoryID=219">xxxxxa> Or similarly with php. In an attempt to log all the clicks that exit their site from certain locations. When google bot comes along and crawls this page, does it still understand that this page links to www.xxxx.ca?
Technical SEO | | adriandg0 -
Will rankings for my micro site rank better if I 301 redirect it to my main site?
This is my first time asking so I will try to be as clear as possible. Ok, I have a micro site that is an (exact match domain) and the domain is a couple 3-4 years old and ranks very well for several search terms. The main two terms it ranks for are like this. houses for rent in XXXXX XXXXX homes for rent (XXXXX equals a city name) The issue is this site has no backlinks, zero advanced SEO, I only did basic optimization to it when i set the site up. Even site structure, url structure all are not good.
Technical SEO | | Robbie8299
The only page I have ever even seen rank is the main root url. But with all that the site does really good in the top 1-2 results for key search terms. Now, I have a main site that is a very big site that has steadily been climbing in search terms every month with great backlinks, optimized for the city and all.
It currently ranks on second page for the listed search terms listed above. What I want to do is 301 redirect this microsite to my city page on my main site that is much better optimized for the key city terms.
The 301 redirect would point this "root domain" (mymicrosite.com) to my city page that looks like this. www.mymaindomain.com/city/XXXXXXX If I do this will Google rank my main URL city page as well as it ranks this microsite with zero links, seo, etc, etc. What happens if it does not? Will I be able to turn off the 301 redirect and keep the microsite rankings? My main reason for wanting this is I want this city page to rank well and I only want to optimize one site instead of both. Any help would be great!0 -
Should I create mini-sites with keyword rich domain names pointing to my main site?
Hi, I'm new to seomoz (and seo in general) and loving it so far. My main domain name is more of a brandname than a search engine friendly list of keywords. I rank well for some keywords I optimized for, and less so for the more competitive keywords. I was wondering if making one page minisites hosted on keyword rich domain names could help in this respect? What I want to do is just have a single page with a few paragraphs of content and links to the main site. I am not looking for links to boost the main site, just for the minisites to do better for several keywords. Will this help? Is this ok, or against some Google policy? Can this hurt the main site rankings? Thank you! **Edit: **I noticed that sites ranking above me on the first page for some keywords have much less on-page elements than my page, have about the same domain trust and also very little inbound links. The only factor I can see is the exact match of keywords in the domain name.
Technical SEO | | Eladla1